The other day on Twitter, the Twitter account @BMoSports214 posed an interesting question: “If you could change three sports moments from the past, what would they be?”
I responded very simply:
- Mets win 2015 World Series
- Mets win Subway Series
- Carlos Beltran swings
Obviously, I don’t ask for much here. Lets go into depth on why I would change each of these three things to swing in our favor, besides from there being a couple of shiny trophies in the Mets Hall of Fame Museum.
Mets win 2015 World Series. We all know what happened in late July. Wilmer Flores cried on the field, I sat in the rain for three hours to watch the Mets lose 8-7 to the Padres and we got Yoenis Cespedes. Then we started winning baseball games while the Nationals started losing baseball games and Jonathan Papelbon choked Bryce Harper. We shocked every sports analyst by even making it to the playoffs; this was supposed to be the final year in the five-bajillion-year long rebuild. Then we beat the Dodgers in five games, which also wasn’t supposed to happen because everyone hates the Mets, especially Chase Utley. The Mets advanced to the NLCS and nobody thought the Mets would beat the Cubs. Hadn’t the poor Cubs fans suffered long enough? Update: 2016 thought they did but 2015 said, “Meh, let them suffer” and the Mets pitching beat the Cubs hitting to shock the baseball world. The Mets had advanced to the World Series where their opponent was the Kansas City Royals, who admittedly had momentum on their side and that’s the only nice thing I’m going to say about them. After that, if you ask “analysts” like Joe Buck and Harold Reynolds, they say Kansas City fought back this entire series and blah blah blah but every single Mets fan knows they beat themselves. Daniel Murphy forgot how to baseball, Lucas Duda had that costly error that allowed Eric Hosmer to score and Juerys Familia couldn’t save a game if Dan Warthen held the gun to his head. The Mets, at one point, had leads in all five World Series games. Game 2 wasn’t gonna our way anyway but yeah, I would definitely change the outcomes of games 1, 4, and 5. And maybe Daniel Murphy would have remembered how to baseball. The only good thing about the 2015 World Series was that it brought us an onslaught of Pete Rose memes. Never die, Pete Rose memes, never die.
Mets win Subway Series. For Mets fans born after 1986, and even those Mets fans that were too young to remember the awesomeness that was the 1986 team, this was our first real heartbreak as Mets fans. It was our second year in a row clinching the Wild Card berth and we made it past the Giants and the Cardinals to face our crosstown rivals in the Subway Series. The Mets played five close games with the Yankees but it ultimately ended with the Yankees celebrating their victory at Shea Stadium and Derek Jeter winning World Series MVP honors. You couldn’t even hate the guy other than the fact that he played for our rivals, so thanks a lot Jetes. I was 11 going on 12 during the 2000 playoffs and I can’t help but to think that if the Mets had won the World Series this year, the entire trajectory of my sports-loving childhood would have been totally different. Instead of trying to get redemption, the Mets went on to average 74 victories over the next four years and became a laughing stock again, which really rubbed salt in the wound. Not only was the game five defeat the last hurrah in the World Series for players like Edgardo Alfonzo, Mike Piazza and Al Leiter, it was also the last World Series game at Shea. The only good thing that came out of the 2000 playoffs was that Mike Hampton’s performance was good enough for him to choose the Colorado school systems over the Mets and then the Mets used the extra draft pick to get some kid from Virginia named David Wright.
Carlos Beltran swings. The 2006 NLCS just hurt a lot. I’m not even gonna recap this torture. Because that’s what it was. Scott Spezio’s stupid red beard still haunts my nightmares. It’s hard to pin all the blame on Carlos Beltran, but he’s the face we have to equate to our defeat. It’s easy to make an argument for blaming Aaron Heilman, Guillermo Mota and Scott Spezio’s stupid red beard but every Mets fan will say, “Beltran could have at least swung.” They’re absolutely right. At best, Beltran would have fouled off the pitch and at worst he would have missed but even if he fouled off the pitch, he would have still been alive in the at bat. I’m sorry, but you can’t have Endy Chavez make the greatest catch ever, Oliver Perez actually pitch decently, be the home team and still lose the game! I would like to think that if he swung and missed, blame would have been put elsewhere but at the same time, I’m still a proud user of the #blamebeltran hashtag. I’m not saying we would have won the game if Beltran had swung, but I would have wanted to see how it played out.
Obviously, we can’t change history. These moments in Mets history, whether we like it or not, made us stronger as Mets fans. Moments like these are what will make getting to the top freaking awesome. I can’t wait to see what 2017 brings us.
Jessica's Mets 